


Consider the Lily

by tillwehavefaces



Category: The Nun's Story - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Anal Sex, Blasphemy, Genderswap, I swear I don't have an anti-religious/anti-Catholic agenda, M/M, Monks, Monksploitation, Not Beta Read, Religious Content, Religious Guilt, seriously I need to go to confession after writing this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-04 21:03:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17905592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tillwehavefaces/pseuds/tillwehavefaces
Summary: There is one struggle Brother Luke does not discuss with his Superiors.





	1. Crazy Hopes

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this fic felt like an act of sacrilege, as this book is one I hold very dear to my heart, and have done since I was first read it as a kid staying at my nana’s house. However, I simply couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I hope this little bit of blasphemy on my part can be at least partially forgiven, in light of the fact that Kathryn Hulme and the nun upon whom the character of Sister Luke was based, Marie Louise Habets, lived openly as a lesbian couple later in life, and the fact that that scene with the Archangel has pretty unambiguous overtones of (attempted) homosexual rape imo, which I have made considerably more explicit in this genderswapped reinterpretation. 
> 
> This fic is based on both the book and the film. When it comes to details where the two differ, I’ve gone with whichever made the most sense for my purposes. Moreover, while Brother Luke and the other nuns are supposed to be monks in this fic, I have been operating on the (no doubt incorrect) assumption that cloistered life is basically the same for male and female monastics. I would love to be corrected if anyone has superior knowledge on this front. And I know its inaccurate to have monks being nurses, or to have male nurses in general, especially in this era. You’ll just have to suspend your disbelief. 😊

It seems as if Thou didst subject those who love Thee to a severe trial: but it is in order that they may learn, in the depths of that trial, the depths of Thy love.

— St Teresa of Ávila

‘ _Simba_ ’, said Brother Luke. His first word in Kiswahili was as easy as a sigh to say.

It was thus, with his head full of the Congo and his eyes heavy with unshed tears, that Brother Luke came to the cluster of buildings behind a high brick wall that would comprise the entirety of his world for the next two years.

So, this is to be my proving ground.

While Father Christopher was locking the door, one of the inmates, a man hugely tall and thickset, jumped up and swept Brother Luke into an impromptu waltz. It was both alarming and strangely exciting to be whirled around by the brawny madman like some peasant girl at a village dance. He had not danced with anyone since the charity fête with Jeanne. Of course, then it was she who had been the female partner.

With the help of a practical nurse even bigger than the patient, Father Christopher gently disentangled the young monk (who hoped his flush would be interpreted innocently). ‘Everything they do is to be accepted as normal.’

They passed the _observatoire,_ the opulent private apartments of the paying patients and then they were through to the padded cells for the violent cases. Father Christopher pointed out the one who thought he was the Archangel Gabriel. Brother Luke nodded to the young man in the cell. ‘ _Bon jour_ , _Archange_.’

The smile he got in return was sweet and earnest and a little shy, and not at all deranged.

So young! he thought. Surely not more than nineteen...

He was reminded, with only a small pang, now, of Simon, the gentle Irishman who had proclaimed them in the _culpa_ for seeking one another’s company. He had never made his vows, Brother Luke recalled. He remembered his eyes, how they had always seemed to seek him out when they sat in circle for the recreation, how startlingly blue they were.

Only the Irish have such eyes. It is as if they carry the sky itself inside their heads.

The Archangel’s were of a blue that was less intense, but somehow brighter, livelier. There were depths to those eyes. They were the azure of a placid ocean, with the barest hint of storms below the surface.

And what storms there had been. Brother Luke picked up, piece by piece, in the recreation and through the overheard gossip of the lay helpers, the almost-mythology that had been woven about the man who called himself the Archangel. On some days he was as angelic as his namesake; on other days, something close to the Devil himself. On one occasion he had taken one of the brothers for a horse, and tried to ride them down the hallway. Once he had escaped outright, impossibly scaling the compound’s high walls. He was found days later in a nearby field, talking calmly with the cattle. Monks and nurses alike had received their share of bruises, sprains and even broken bones at the Archangel’s hands.

_You may never enter that cell alone. Always two or three._

Reconciling this history with the almost childlike meekness the man displayed, at least around Brother Luke, seemed impossible. There must surely have been some mistake about the categorisation—it seemed less likely for this gentle man to do hurt to another living soul than for the Abbot with his reverently stored grey habit and swollen edemic ankles to cartwheel naked down the table at refectory (as had been attempted by an inmate the week before, ending in two dislocations and a broken clavicle). This curiosity was perhaps the beginning of the attachment which would be Brother Luke’s downfall. Curiosity, and vanity.

It was vanity, and only vanity, he knew, that caused him to imagine the sparkle that came into those eyes when he approached the Archangel’s cell; the undercurrent of affectionate teasing that gentled the rough tones of the Archangel’s voice when they talked together. To think that shy smile was a gift reserved for him alone. _Vanity, vanity, vanity,_ and worse, a sinful exclusivity of attachment.

He opened the door and handed through the paper cup under the watchful but incurious eyes of two stout nurse-aides. The Archangel’s strong, coarse hand brushed against his as the man took the cup. Brother Luke froze. It had been months since he had felt the touch of living flesh against his own. The touch lingered, and though it was only for a second longer than it should have been, it was startlingly intimate.

Even with Jeanne it never went beyond hand-holding. They had agreed mutually not to observe the customary social kiss, lest it lead to something more, although in the beginning neither of them had had more than the dimmest idea of what ‘more’ was supposed to be. It had been almost seven years since they first met as children with chill-reddened cheeks, shuffled next to each other in a pew at midnight mass, tingling fingers brushing and misty breath mingling over the missal.

He had loved her, of course, or he thought he loved her. But it had been a love first of the mind, and later of the heart. It had had nothing of the body in it. Besides father’s disapproval, to have gone through with it wouldn’t have been fair on either of them. It would have been a sham, profane in the sight of God.

She had been beautiful, or so people said. He always thought it silly that so much attention should be paid something that was at once so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, and at the same time so insignificant, or rather, so incidental to all that she was. Why did people talk always and only of her physical beauty, when she was so miraculously, radiantly beautiful in all her other ways? It seemed trite, wrong even, to reduce her all-loveliness to a pretty face.

Of course, Brother Luke had never paid attention to the things that obsessed other boys. He supposed he would have been guilty, when he first realised what he was missing, if he hadn’t always been different in one way or another _._ Mostly, he was thankful to God for sparing him the temptations of the flesh.

The guilt had come later, with the revelation that, while the pictures of semiclad girls clandestinely circulated by the other boys in his school did not interest him, the bodies of his schoolmates, awkward and gangling as they were, did.

Jeanne had helped with that. When he was with her, he could immerse himself in the sheer delight that was being in her company, and forget about everything else, for a while. With her help, and through prayers and many secret tears, he had quelled his wayward inclinations, until the sight of a shirtless farm boy in a field gave his conscience only the gentlest twinge.

He now realised, to his discomfort, that this apparent victory had been only a reprieve, for there the Archangel was, in all his height and breadth and youth, and rude, masculine glory, and here Brother Luke was, ogling him like an overawed milkmaid.  Now was the time to practice modesty of the eyes. But he found he could not look away.

Instead, he drank it all in, the sureness and restrained power, the unconscious sensuality of the man’s movements. The working of his throat as he gulped down the water, the lean lines of his arms and shoulders, still bearing the imprints of a life of labour that his years of confinement had yet to erase. A stray droplet of water spilled from the corner of the Archangel’s mouth, and ran down his neck to glisten like a pearl in the dip of his collarbone.

He handed the cup back with a whispered, ‘ _Merci, chérie’,_ and a white smile flashed from under those broad-boned cheeks. Brother Luke’s own cheeks heated, as they always did when he was addressed in such terms by the inmates (but especially when it was the Archangel). The Archangel’s smile deepened, and he bent down, hot breath ghosting over Brother Luke’s hands.

‘Thank you, darling’, he repeated, and pressed a kiss to the monk’s slightly-quavering fingers.

Later that week Brother Luke witnessed the inspection for dangerous items. A kitchen knife had been discovered inside the mattress of one of the inmates—how they had got it was anyone’s guess; the cunning of the insane could not be fathomed by one who had not seen it up close.

It meant the overturning of each cell, and strip-searching of each patient. The Archangel, along with the others, had to endure being roused to wakefulness, turned out of his cell, and then lined up to submit to the ungentle fingers of the practical nurses, spreading and prodding. Even through the indignity, he had a smile for Brother Luke. Brother Luke felt his heart swell with tenderness and pity, and not a little guilty admiration for the man’s body, which was tanned and thickly muscled—a working man’s body, through and through.

Then the Archangel’s cotton trousers were pulled briskly down. Brother Luke looked at the crucifix on the wall.

 

As he became familiar with the inmates and wardens of this little self-contained world, some personalities stood out like diamonds among zircons. There was the Abbot, for one, his face brown and crinkled like a paper bag beneath his faux-tonsure. Over the course of his little colloquies with the former monk on his bed of poverty, Brother Luke came to view this gentle madman as almost a surrogate Superior. There was Brother Marie and his mysterious, almost mystical power over the insane. Brother Marie and his total, unflinching self-sacrifice, humility and obedience that came with none of the distance or severity that so often manifested in Living Rules. It was hard, Brother Luke reflected, to live and work among saints, yet to be forbidden to pay them the reverence they deserved.  

Above all, there was the Archangel.

 _‘Allô, chérie!_ ’ the tall man would call out as he hopped to the baths, encased in his _maillot_ like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, golden waves shaking like the mane of a lion rampant.

No matter how often he heard the happy greeting, Brother Luke could not rid himself of the thrill of, not pride, exactly (or so he told himself), but something close to it—a kind of satisfaction, the same he felt when the brothers whispered, ‘There goes the little friend of the Archangel.’ At first he fooled himself by masking it as nothing more than the gratification of work well done, the pleasure a doctor took when he began to see signs of recovery in a patient.

But it was not long before Brother Luke, never one for self-delusion, was forced to admit that his feelings for the Archangel ran further. There came to him the words of St Agnes in the antiphon. _Posuit signum in faciem meam ut nullum praeter eum amatorem admittam…He has set a seal on my face so I may know no other love but His…_

As he walked to the dormitory, letting his hand rest over the keys that hung from his belt, so they did not clink, Brother Luke meditated on the nature of love.

To love all men was of Christ, but to _love_ a man—to love him in _this_ way, was unspeakably wicked. Brother Luke could no longer deny what it was he felt. To try to pretend it was only pity and Christian charity—that would be a kind of inner dissembling, an attempt to cheat himself. What Brother Luke felt was not only a sin, but one he could not bring himself to name, even in his head. It was a _peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum_ —a sin too horrible to be named among Christians. His besetting sin, as great as his pride and self-will, and worse because he dared not reveal it, even in confession, and so the struggle must be as secret as it was bitter.

 _Through the eyes_ , said St. Bernard, _the deadly arrows of love enter_ , and how fatally true that had proved. It all stemmed from his first failure in modesty of the eyes. He had looked when he should not have, and the looking had become a longing and longing had become lust, and with lust—unannounced, unanticipated, but ineluctable—had come love.

The lesson that morning had been from Hebrews. _For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin._

The text said _in all points_ , yet to suggest that Christ had been tempted as Brother Luke was being tempted... It was the foulest blasphemy he could imagine. Yet if it was _not_ true, the text was false.

_Save Thy servant, O Lord, for in Thee is his hope. Let him be good and humble. Let him be exalted by obedience. Let him be bound to peace..._

 

As he attempted to trace the root of the malady, Brother Luke's thoughts turned often to Simon, and his blue Irish eyes. Somehow they had always managed to find each other, through no conscious intent, at least on Brother Luke’s part, and despite the rigidity with which the Rule apportioned their time. Sometimes, if they found themselves alone in a quiet, out-of-the-way room or passage, of which the labyrinthine motherhouse was full, the man had hesitated in such a way, tilted his head at such an angle, parted his lips just so and leaned forward, it was almost as if he were going to...

But no, _no!_ It was only his own wicked lust that imputed such an evil intention to Simon’s behaviour. It was his own wishing, that was all. The root and branch of the poison tree was in _his_ heart, alone.

For the first time, Brother Luke was seriously considering whether he should make his final vows.

How are we to avoid the occasions of sin when every waking moment is a temptation?

Yet if Brother Luke possessed one faculty, it was will. He always observed St Teresa’s maxim to her nuns: _Be gentle to all and stern with yourself._ Before, his self-control had seemed an iron cage, preventing him from falling into the easy, natural obedience of a truly perfect monk. Now it was the tool with which he would claw his way to holiness.

However painful it becomes, however many times I must mortify the deeds of the flesh, I _will_ persevere, and I will _not_ allow the shadow of my corruption to touch my brothers.

Still, he could not help the longing; the longing to feel, just once, the touch of another human being. To feel the strong arms of a man—of Simon or the Archangel—about him. How he wished he could stop struggling, just for a moment, and release himself utterly into the power of one who loved him.

Jesus loves you. Lean on His everlasting arms, and let that be enough.

It should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

 

During his periods of private study in the sanatorium’s library, Brother Luke came across the words of St Bernadine of Sienna: _No sin in the world grips the soul as the accursed sodomy; this sin has always been detested by all those who live according to God.… Deviant passion is close to madness; this vice disturbs the intellect, destroys elevation and generosity of soul, brings the mind down from great thoughts to the lowliest, makes the person slothful, irascible, obstinate and obdurate, servile and soft and incapable of anything; furthermore, agitated by an insatiable craving for pleasure, the person follows not reason but frenzy._ _… They become blind and, when their thoughts should soar to high and great things, they are broken down and reduced to vile and useless and putrid things, which could never make them happy…. Just as people participate in the glory of God in different degrees, so also in hell some suffer more than others. He who lived with this vice of sodomy suffers more than another, for this is the greatest sin._

St John Chrysostom and St Cyprian said much the same. Even St Basil, the great first Founder, had this advice: _If you, O monk, are young in either body or mind, shun the companionship of other young men and avoid them as you would a flame. For through them the enemy has kindled the desires of many and then handed them over to eternal fire, hurling them into the vile pit of the five cities under the pretence of spiritual love..._

_Ye who love the Lord, hate evil..._

It became horribly clear to him, then, what he must do. He must go to Father Christopher, confess, and request to be transferred to another wing, somewhere away from the Archangel and his bewitching eyes.

Yet already, in the space of only a few months, the thought of never seeing the Archangel again filled him with a despair that was as total as it was irrational and indefensible. Even Father Marcellus’ request had been nothing compared to this.

 _The sacrifices that are required of us are bearable only if we make them with love_. But what when love itself was the sacrifice?

Lord Jesus, I am not able to give up my love for this man.  You must take it from me; take it, and make it something pure and pleasing in Your sight.


	2. The Annunciation

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.

— St Teresa of Ávila

It was a quarter to nine. The ward was quiet, the silence of perfection. In the recreation was a party in honour of Father Christopher’s name-day, from which Brother Luke had voluntarily absented himself, so that he could take Brother Marie’s night watch.

As he was reading Tante Colette’s latest letter, smiling over his father’s indignance at his assignation to ‘that idiot asylum’, the silence was broken by the sound of the Archangel rapping at the window in his cell door.  ‘I’m so thirsty, _chérie_. A thirst of all the devils.’

The man stood there, incongruously big in his long nightshirt, wide, childlike eyes imploring so eloquently, so earnestly. There was an almost-intimacy there. _You know me, chérie,_ they seemed to say. _You know I would never do anything to hurt my darling._ How could Brother Luke refuse?

He went to the tap and filled a paper cup with water. He unlocked the door and opened it the merest fraction. The second he put his hand through the slender gap, fingers wrapped around his wrist and he was jerked into the cell.

Before he could so much as cry out, the Archangel had him up against a cloth-covered wall and was pawing at his body, breaths warm and rapid in Brother Luke’s face. This sudden violence seemed incomprehensible to Brother Luke, who had read the diagnosis but never witnessed the Archangel’s schizophrenia in savage action.

There was not time to think—the next moments were made up of a flurry of impressions: the heat and largeness and strength of the body that was embracing him; steely fingers grabbing and grasping at his habit, as Brother Luke tried vainly to push him off, feeling feeble as a child. First went the crucifix and belt, with its ring of keys. Then the scapular, then the tunic underneath. Brother Luke didn’t waste breath on screams—no sound could get through the hermetically-sealed glass doors at the end of the corridor. He poured all his energy into trying to wrestle out of the Archangel’s frenzied embrace—a foredoomed endeavour, given the maniac was almost twice his size and weight. He fought nonetheless, but even as he struggled, there was a part of him that told him not to resist, not to spoil it, a part of him that had been craving this for years, since imagination had first given shape to his desire.

Now that Brother Luke was only in his underclothes, the Archangel’s touches became gentler, less frantic. His broad farmer’s hands roamed over the monk’s body, pinching and stroking through the thin fabric of his undergarments, keeping his bulk against Brother Luke, so the smaller man could barely breathe, let alone break free. All the while the Archangel whispered ‘ _Chérie, chérie’!_ in the heady intonations of a lover. Brother Luke trembled under the caresses, finding them more terrible than blows. Blows, indeed, would have made more sense.

But then, it did make a kind of horrifying, stomach-churningly wonderful, sense. There was no doubt now about the Archangel’s intentions—his erection was jabbing into Brother Luke’s stomach. Even as Brother Luke marvelled at the length of the Archangel’s endowment, the man was searching out Brother Luke’s panting mouth with his own and engulfed it in a fierce kiss, all teeth and tongue. Hot humiliation flooded through him as he heard himself moan against that ruthless, devouring mouth, and felt his own sex and nipples harden under the Archangel’s tweaking and rubbing. Nobody had ever touched him like this, even Jeanne—then the Archangel was biting down, hard, on an inflamed nipple, and all thoughts of Jeanne were chased from his mind.

The Archangel gave a grunt, and Brother Luke found himself abruptly spun round and shoved on his face, as his underwear was yanked briskly to one side and a spit-slicked finger was pressing urgently, insistently at the clenched pucker of his rear passage. The wooing was over, it seemed; now the Archangel meant to have his prize.

Brother Luke lay there, squirming on his belly as the younger man inexpertly worked a finger in and out of his hole. It was a strange sensation—unpleasant, yes, but also undeniably pleasurable. Brother Luke loathed himself for not hating it. Then one finger became two, and two became three, and tears were starting from the corners of Brother Luke’s eyes—he wasn’t sure he could take any more.

‘Easy, darling’, the man murmured, as if gentling one of his Percherons, and the softness of his words belied the rough, fast pace he was now setting with his thick, calloused fingers. Then the fingers were gone, and Brother Luke felt a rush of relief (but also dismay) at the sudden emptiness. Then he felt dismay (and also relief) as the fingers were replaced by a fleshy presence much, much larger.

Brother Luke could not help but cry out when he felt the size of him, hot and heavy against his virginal hole. It was enough to make the monk start up the struggle again, but the Archangel bore down on him with his weight, and Brother Luke was again gasping for breath, panting out futile protestations as the adamantine hardness pushed impatiently, inexorably, forward.

‘ _Oh God!’_

Brother Luke did scream then, a scream of equal parts joy and wonder and pain, as he was breached. This then was the culmination and accomplishment of his most despicable desire, the abominable sin which Christians were not even to mention. It was a pain worse than anything he had yet known, the sort of pain that he had seen make grown men howl for morphine. But there was no drug for Brother Luke, no antidote to the malarial fever that coursed through his veins as the Archangel pushed onward, until the tears were streaming down his cheeks and he was sure he must be split open, as irreparably damaged in body as he was in soul.

The pain did not last for long, however, and pleasure came close on its heels. He felt the walls of his colon stretch and contract as the love-crazed lunatic plunged in and out, back and forth in a frenetic rhythm. His arousal, which had wilted from the initial shock and agony, now plumpened between his body and the soft quilted floor as the Archangel huffed and groaned above him, ramming into him with punishing thrusts that shook his slender frame. He clawed at the floor; he tasted cotton.

It seemed to go on for an eternity, an eternity in which Brother Luke could think of nothing—not the Rule, not pride or chastity or obedience, or even Reverend Father Emmanuel—nothing but the blinding ecstasy that consumed him as this nineteen-year-old farm boy rutted him like a two-centime prostitute.

He was jolted out of his reverie by the realisation that the Archangel had stopped moving.

‘ _Chérie!’_

The man’s hands tightened around his hips as the Archangel gave one last thrust, which drove in deeper, deeper than ever before—so deep he could feel the man’s heavy testes resting against his perineum. He was so _full—_ and then, he realised, with an involuntary noise of delight, he was being _filled,_ the Archangel’s climax coming in scorching spurts that coated his inner walls and triggered an avalanche of sensation that finished in him arching back and moaning as his own completion came, sticky and warm, against his belly. ‘Oh God!’, he wept, and begged the Lord to forgive him his blasphemy, for it was the most forgivable of all his sins that night.

Then all was still, as still as it had been before he drew that fated cup of water, though it was a changed silence. He relaxed, hurting but sated, as the Archangel’s sex softened within him, and his seed cooled on Brother Luke’s thighs. He felt drained—more than drained; he felt blown out, like a candle in the wind. He felt emptied, like a broken vessel. He felt…defiled. It was the most exquisite feeling he had ever experienced, surpassing his first vows and his final, his first mass and first oyster, and far, far outstripping his first (and last, as it had turned out) kiss from Jeanne, which seemed now a pale and a paltry thing, in light of the worlds that had been opened in his mind by this rustic horse-breeder with a provincial accent, this boy who thought himself a divine messenger.

But, as the fever quietened, and the full vastness of it all came home to him, he trembled once more. He had to—he had to get away, to find help or _something—_ though the thought of seeing his brothers…

A hand came up to curl around his neck and chapped lips brushed his shoulder.

‘Stay, _chérie’,_ the Archangel whispered against Brother Luke’s skin, the heat of his still-semi-erect member a burning brand between the monk’s buttocks. For a single instant, in which Brother Luke must surely have gone as mad as the man who held him, the monk thought of staying, of forgetting all struggles for one night and letting himself be held, be loved, even by a love as wild and excruciating and impossible as that of the Archangel.

Then reason returned, riding on his pain to rescue him. It wasn’t Brother Luke alone who was at risk—how could he have forgotten the fifteen other patients in the corridor, and those in the apartments beyond?

Slowly, carefully, so as not to arouse suspicion in the crazed mind that held him, he nudged the door open with his foot. Then, when he felt the Archangel’s grip slacken, and his breaths come slow and even on his neck, he leapt to his feet and threw himself through the doorway.

He had just enough presence of mind to slam the door shut behind him, the Archangel bellowing and beating his fists against it as Brother Luke staggered to the alarm and then back to the desk. When he sat, a thrill of pain shot through him, so he remained standing, clutching the disarray of his underclothes about him.

Brother Marie appeared almost instantaneously, backed by two hulking stalwarts. Of course, it _had_ to be Brother Marie. The tall monk’s gaze, as he took in with one glance Brother Luke and all that had transpired, was brimming with horror and limitless compassion.

If only _,_ Brother Luke would reflect later, it had been over quickly. Then I could perhaps have cheated myself as to what happened, could have pretended, at least to myself, that it wasn’t...that. If only he hadn’t been so brutal, then maybe the scope and nature of Brother Luke’s injuries could have been concealed from the infirmary brothers. If only he had been _more_ brutal, then perhaps Brother Luke wouldn’t have responded as he did, wouldn’t have arched into the man’s thrusts, would have screamed like a martyr, rather than a whore.

If only I hadn’t...

But this sort of thinking was vain. _You can cheat your Superior and your brothers. You can even, for a time, cheat yourself. But there is One whom you can never cheat. You cannot cheat God._

And for Brother Marie to see me that way...

Brother Luke had been prepared for death, not in a heroic, vainglorious way, but in the simple, quite ordinary fact that his life mattered less to him than his faith. For what had occurred in the Archangel’s cell...

Do they prepare nuns for this? Do they tell them that this could happen to them?

How could anyone be prepared for _that_? A bitter voice answered.

But then there came the accusatory voice of his conscience. You speak as if you had not been dreaming of that moment every day for the past months, as if you have not been reliving it every night since.

When Brother Luke had offered his life to God, it had been on the understanding that henceforth nothing would happen to him that He did not permit. Whatever would happen, as the Masters had always reminded them, it would be for God’s glory and his own good.

He could not see the glory or the good in this.

 

Brother Luke had been offered a rare reprieve, normally extended only to the severely ill, an opportunity to return to the motherhouse to recuperate physically and spiritually. He refused, of course, although Father Christopher had been insistent. In the end, though, the Superior had seen that for Brother Luke the most merciful thing would be to allow him, once his physical wounds had healed, to resume his work as if nothing had happened. The other monks also observed this charity. Nothing was said in refectory or recreation of what had occurred. He even had a penance to perform, as if his fault had been one of ordinary pride and disobedience, and as if his bandaged wrists and blackened eyes were all he had suffered for it.

Inside, he was in turmoil. What had happened was entirely his own fault, of course. Beyond the immediate acts of opening the door when he should not have, of entering the cell alone when he should have called for help, there was all that had preceded it.

He had led the Archangel on: blushing instead of rebuking when the man called him ‘chérie’, cultivating a dangerous special attachment under the pretext of having a good working relationship with the patient, all the while his mind was devising the most loathsome fantasies. Most damning, most sickening of all: there had been at least a part of Brother Luke—a part which had for a time seemed to become the whole of him—that had _enjoyed_ it.

_Save Thy servant, O Lord, for in Thee is his hope…_

 

Work went on as usual, save that he was never again permitted to take solitary duty. Nights and days blurred together. The practical aides joined his brothers in appearing for all purposes to forget what had happened. He wished he could cast the events of that night from his own mind into the embrace of oblivion.

The Abbot on his little dunghill of rags and mattress stuffing was the only person not a part of the pact of compassionate silence.

_My child, did he hurt you?_

The question echoed through his mind for weeks. Did he hurt me, or did I only hurt myself?


	3. And the Angel Said Unto Mary

Pain is never permanent.

— St Teresa of Ávila

 

The sky when he returned to Belgium was grey with the expectation of rain. The quiet of the motherhouse filled him to the brim with its cold peace, until he was drowning in the silence. At night he heard the pounding of drums, the rustle of leaves, the hoots and howls and growls of the bush. He saw the yellow lantern of Dr Fortunati’s face hanging over him as it hung over patients on the operating table, felt his delicate surgeon’s hands as he performed that fateful, forbidden examination.

Once, Father Matthias, the only Superior to whom Brother Luke had ever felt able to disclose his most shameful of secrets, had asked, ‘You’re not in love with him, are you, my child? Because it would break my heart if you were in love and had not told me.’

 

Europe was an ordeal, beyond the change of climate. In the Congo his temptations, while never disappearing, exactly, had seemed smaller, diminished by the hugeness of the jungle and the river; by the vast purple horizon and the blazing golden sun. There was always so much to do, so much to see; there was too much noise to listen to wayward thoughts. Now, confined to the motherhouse without even his nursing to distract him, his months of rest became a crucible. Handed an overabundance of time, after so many years of never having enough, even after throwing away the caffeine Brother Luke was tormented by recollections and imaginings. The very tranquillity of the cloister magnified, and intensified his inner struggles. The motherhouse was a microscope, a magnifying glass, and while Brother Luke appeared outwardly to meet the test, inwardly the contest raged fiercer than ever. No matter how he strove to keep the custody of his eyes, he could not help but glance at the faces of his brothers, especially the tall, fresh-faced postulants, bright-eyed and vibrating with vital energy, and would feel sick with shame as a current of perverse lust stirred his loins and wetted his lips. Worse was how they looked back at him, eyes shining with admiration as they gazed at Brother Luke, the perfect nurse and perfect monk, whose faults against the Rule, it was whispered, were in truth deliberate dispensations of grace to the neophytes, that they might not be discouraged by too perfect an example. So his loss of appetite was marked as a private discipline; his careful indifference to lusty Flemish farm lad and handsome Walloon aristocrat alike a demonstration that Brother Luke was no respecter of persons; the charity of his smile when catching a novice in an imperfection—whether of vanity or tardiness or waste, or simple thoughtlessness, light glancing off the surface of a sea of benevolence.

When a novice, first apprehending the meaning of the word _community,_ and the enormity it contained, he had mourned for the lost spaces of solitude he thought he had surrendered forever. Now he understood how it was possible to be surrounded at all times by other people, and yet to be deeply, incommunicably alone nonetheless.

Was it like this for our Lord, when He was sweating blood in the Garden while the disciples slept?

 

With the advent of war, the dreams returned, more horrible and more exhilarating than ever. He would turn his face into the straw pillow and close his eyes, only to find himself in the refectory of the motherhouse, ready to begin a penance, gasping when he realised that he wore no habit. He wore only a heavy crucifix made of nails which tore his skin and a crown of barbed wire and orange blossoms, with the words _whore_ and _slut_ scrawled across his naked flesh. He knelt to kiss the feet of the monks, feeling their merciless, judging stares upon him all the while, but found it was not their feet he was to kiss, but their manhoods, standing proud and erect under the table. Then, after he had swallowed the salt seed of every monk in the hall, the dream would shift, and he was kneeling before the Superior once more, bowl in hand. Only it was not their soup they doled into his bowl, but sperm, the ejaculate of an entire monastery, and the eyes of the Reverend Father Emmanuel commanding him to drink it.

Sometimes the dreams ended there. Other times, as he drained the last dregs of his cup of shame, he would find himself now back in the Congo, being raped by a pack of natives, his small white body split asunder by their monstrous black members as he was violated in time with the maddening drumbeats. All the while the white-habited mission brothers—Father Matthias, Brother Augustine, Brother Eucharistus and dear, martyred Brother Aurèle —would stand nearby, watching impassively.

Then he was in the cell of the Archangel, sweating, writhing, sobbing beneath him, as the man huffed and pounded his engorged organ into Brother Luke’s overstretched hole, the monk’s own member hard and leaking against the padded floor. His hands scrabbled forward—and meet warm flesh. Looking up, he saw that Simon was there, naked and erect, thrusting himself against Brother Luke’s lips. Brother Luke opened his mouth to receive him, and a thrill of lust and depraved joy went through him, to be so used by two men at once, as though he himself were nothing that mattered, nothing but a vessel for their pleasure. Thus shall I expiate my sins of the flesh...

Finally, strangest of all were the dreams where he was sitting in a walled garden, lined with whispering trees and bright flowerbeds. Feeling an unusual weight at his middle, he looked down to see his belly huge and round and distended, as though he were with child. The Archangel was standing over him, golden hair kindled to flame by a radiant halo, snowy wings stretching from wall to wall. The angel opened his mouth, and his voice was like fire and ice. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou above all woman and blessed shall be the fruit of thy womb.’

His chest welled with an indescribable feeling. His mouth opened, and just as the swell of emotion crested on his tongue, Brother Luke awoke, his heart pounding as though it might burst, his nightgown drenched, practically see-through with sweat, and his sex diamond-hard. There was an ache in his chest, a pain that was sublime beyond measure. He wished with all his being that what he had seen could come to pass, grotesque and fantastic as it was.

God, my God! went up the cry of a heart in deepest anguish. Why wasn’t I born a woman?

During the Miserere he forgot moderation altogether, whipping his back and shoulders until the blood formed puddles on the floor. The two nights a week weren’t enough, so on other nights he held the chains tightly together and soundlessly scraped the little hooks down his body, until the pain eclipsed all carnal thoughts.

 

The months passed. There were times when the dreams were not so bad— when he was too exhausted to do more than mumble the psalm before collapsing unto a stony sleep. Sometimes he was almost felt a horrible gratitude that the hospital on the Holland border was always busy and thus the work always hard. Work kept his mind off things, kept the memories at bay.

When at the bedside of a patient in the small hours of the night, he broke the Grand Silence, feeling less guilt at this imperfection than at the salt sting of hypocrisy whenever he talked to a worldling of the things of Christ. But he couldn’t not speak, couldn’t refrain from giving comfort to the flailing souls whose pain had become their Purgatory. All he said was true, even if it was truth he was not strong enough to live. The spring was pure to which he led these lost sheep, though he himself was polluted.

In time, the sick pantomime of his dreamlife acquired new characters: the farmer-Father, the ploughman-pilot and the tall, fair, grey-eyed German officer who had deposited his demimondaine paramour in the monks’ safekeeping. He did not eat so much as a mouthful of the meat the man sent, but in his dreams...

⁂

 

The Reverend Father Emmanuel didn’t seem to have aged a day since Brother Luke first caught sight of him, all those years ago, as a nervous young postulant. As the august Superior sat, his back did not touch the seat—one of the first signs of the patriarch’s inexhaustible inner strength that same postulant had noticed. Brother Luke wondered if _he_ had ever been tempted, this great living Christ who was neither man nor woman.

‘I have tried, Reverend Father.’  And I have come to the end of trying, and of waiting. 

‘My child...’

For the first time a note of hesitation entered Reverend Father Emmanuel’s voice. Brother Luke had never heard the Superior sound uncertain about anything. ‘This isn’t because of...’

Yes! The answer roared I’m his head with a savagery that horrified him. Yes it is because of _that_ , Reverend Father, that which you cannot bring yourself to name and which I cannot make myself forget. I was raped, and yes, I still think about it—every day, in fact, and dream about it at night, and sometimes when I wake my nightshirt is dripping and not with sweat only.

In a moment the storm had passed, and he wanted nothing more then to throw himself to the dirt and wash the Father General’s feet with penitent tears. But, if he did that, if he took the consolation Reverend Father Emmanuel was so plainly aching to give, then his resolution would falter, and he would be unable to go through with it.

So he stayed still as a painted icon, and said, calmly but determinedly, ‘No, Reverend Father. It isn’t that—at least, not mostly. Did not our Lord say that it was out of the heart that wickedness came? It is my own weakness that has led me to this place, as it was my own pride and disobedience that led to...’

What could he say? The words that came to his tongue he could not even utter into the quiet air of the monastery. He was aware of a gulf, vast and unbridgeable, opening between them with these unsaid words, leaving him and the Superior irretrievably separated, stranded on two halves of the world.

‘And there is nothing we can do?’

‘Nothing. Please don’t think I harbour any bitterness toward the Order, or the faith. I do not blame God, _mon père_ ; I do not blame you or the brothers. I blame only myself.’

‘Oh, my child.’ But the Reverend Father shook his ancient, noble head, the bronze folds of his skin catching the fading light, glinting like the masterpiece of some Baroque master. He rose to his feet, the motion perfectly smooth despite his years.

‘When I go from here, I shall carry you with me in my heart, and keep you each day in my prayers.’

Brother Luke bowed his head. Firmly, slowly, the Reverend Father Emmanuel traced the sign of the Cross on his forehead, one last time.

If only your blessing could erase my shame, father.


	4. Chapter 4

It is love alone that gives worth to all things.

 — St Teresa of Ávila

 

At the end of the narrow cobbled street, he turned into a covered alley, and leaned his head against a blacked-out window. Soon it would be Tierce. _Woe is me, that my sojourn is prolonged: I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar: my soul hath long been a sojourner…_

Whose was the face that looked back at him from the darkling glass? He wasn’t Brother Luke, not any more. Once, a lifetime ago, he had been Gabriel. Gabriel van der Mal, former monk, former fiancé, former brother, former son... Sinking to the ground, he buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.

When the tears stopped, he rose and wiped his face with the handkerchief the Vestiaire had provided and straightened to face the day. He would go first to the address given him by the enigmatic Englishman, and offer his services, such as they were, to the Resistance. Now no Rule could hinder him from helping his country in her most desperate hour. Then, once the war was over, however it was over, he would return to Brussels and what was left of his family. If there _was_ anything left by the time the _boches_ were finished raping his land.

 

⁂

 

‘Good profit on the endives, Monsieur’, he added politely, and picked up his suitcase, turning to face the pale sun that was just beginning to thaw the icy square. All so quiet, so still, as if in waiting.

I’m in your hands now, Lord.

He made enquiries. The address on the paper turned out to be a farm on the outskirts of the town. The farmer from the café, passing Gabriel in the street, offered him transport, which he gratefully accepted. 

‘She is slow, of course,’ here the man gestured mournfully at the old but sure-footed nag that pulled the cart, ‘but what can one do?  Petrol is impossible—but impossible—to come by.’  He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyes heavenward. Gabriel smiled sympathetically, but found himself at a loss for words. After all those years chiding himself for each needless word uttered, the delicacies of smalltalk, which used to come so naturally to him, now dissolved on his tongue as he groped for something to say. Fortunately, the old farmer seemed content to hold up more than his half of the conversation. Gabriel took the words in, but they skimmed off the surface of his mind like oil flowing over water. How odd it was to hear someone talk so freely about nothing at all.

Yes, he knew the family well, the man said, when Gabriel disclosed his destination. A good, pious family of Limburgish farmers. The young master—alas—had a spell of illness, many years back, and had to be taken away to a hospital in the Condroz. Those years were very hard for Mevr. Somers. She has the gout you see, and suffers greatly. The young man is returned now, God be praised...’

‘God be praised’, Gabriel murmured in echo, but his mind was far, far away, filled with the clear, solemn chanting of hundreds of male voices, and the distant beating of drums...

 

It was drawing on to dusk when he disembarked. He bade the farmer farewell, and walked up the lane to the farmhouse, picking his way between ice-rimmed puddles and wet manure. A pair of draught-horses leaned over a fence and regarded him incuriously. He hesitated before the door, hand on the rough-hewn wooden knocker, not sure who he was expecting to open it. He had only the address and the name to go by.

The late afternoon sun was slanting into his eyes when the door swung inward, so he did not at first see who had opened it.

The figure standing in the doorway was male, blond-haired and blue-eyed and very tall. At first Gabriel could not speak. Then, stammering, he told who had sent him, and asked for the name that had been on the paper.

‘I am Adrien.’

‘Archangel…’ The name, which for fourteen years he had not been able to utter, even in prayer, now slipped out between his lips as involuntarily as the _Benedicite_ when someone sneezed.

A shadow passed over the man’s face, and a new wariness came into his eyes—but it was only the wariness of one confronted with a stranger who knows more than he ought. ‘Please, Monsieur, I prefer not to speak of it.’

He doesn’t recognise me. The thought exploded slowly in his mind with the force of a hydrogen bomb and the softness of a flower in bloom. He clutched at his breast for his crucifix, and ended up scrabbling uselessly at the buttons of his shirt. The Archangel—Adrien—drew in a flat breath, and his eyes narrowed slightly.

But of course! Gabriel’s rational self—what had not been blown up—exclaimed. Though his mind was reeling from the revelation, staggering about his head like a drunkard looking for purchase, he remembered: difficulties in working and long-term memory are classic symptoms of dementia præcox. The likelihood of remembering events that had transpired during a psychotic episode over a decade ago, especially for a patient who had evidently recovered, was so minuscule as to be not worth mentioning. Take away the habit...

His throat felt like it was closing up, choked with fear and shock and indecision, and worse than that, with hate. Here was the man who had tormented him all these years, had hounded him over the seas to Africa and back, who had haunted his nights, and made his flesh a furnace of unnatural craving. The heat of the sun seemed to come in pulses, and his head throbbed in time.

Lord, help me.

Then, all at once, his heart was lifted up in ardent prayer, and he seemed to see the figure of Christ hovering above him, Sacred Heart blossoming from His chest, flowing with streams of red and white. As Gabriel’s face was touched by the rays of blood and water, the words of Father Marcellus whispered in his ears. _Out of His eternal time, God chooses His moment to offer the most perfect alliance with each individual soul_. Gabriel had never hoped, had never dared even to pray, that such an opportunity would come to him again. The Lord knew he did not deserve it. Yet here it was.

 _‘Be not afraid, my son: it is I; and I will not abandon you. Fear not,_ said the bleeding Saviour. _It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world, and it is to be trampled and abused by men that I summoned My children to My Cross. If they have called the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of His household? You were persecuted, yet I did not forsake you; you were cast down, yet I did not suffer you to be destroyed. Your body was violated, My son, but your soul I have held in My hand from the day of your birth, and all your trials have but served to purify you, as gold in a refiner’s fire. Now your heart is ready to hold the fullness of My grace. Verily, greater than these shall ye do…_

The confusion and anger flowed out of him, and in their place came love, love full and free. Now Gabriel saw what he must do.

His charity and forgiveness, given unspoken and unasked-for to this unwitting offender, would be an act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which must have been so deeply wounded when Gabriel turned his back on the Church, His holy Bride. He had been spared the Red Martyrdom of the dysentery or the tuberculosis, or of a German bullet, that he might undergo the daily White Martyrdom of living and working alongside this man who had stalked the halls of his memory for the last fourteen years.

Blessed Saviour, I thank you for this grace of sacrifice. I will try to carry this cross with a light heart and a cheerful countenance, and if I stumble, grant that I may stumble toward Thee…

He saw his prayer fly from his lips to delightfully pierce the Sacred Heart as a Golden Arrow of Reparation, unleashing fresh torrents of graces.

Then a cloud passed over the sun, and the vision ceased.

‘Monsieur?’

‘I’m sorry. I am a little tired.’

Adrien stood back, holding the door open with that same shy smile, unchanged despite the new lines the years had carved on his face. Gabriel nodded his thanks and walked in. As he brushed past, the man’s gaze seemed briefly to hitch on something.

Gabriel felt so strange not wearing his habit. It would take some getting used to. Many things would take getting used to.

In the dark hall stood a tall, brass-framed mirror, the glass a pool of silvery dimness. It was the first mirror he had seen in years.

His hand went up automatically to brush back a stray twist of hair. _Not a single lock of grey..._


End file.
